As part of the GEMNET/GIST Fall issue on Human Rights, GEM interviewed Bella Abzug, President of Womens Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Ms. Abzug is a former U.S. Congresswoman from New York and is a well known activist for human rights.

Ciao, Bella: My 1600 days with Bella Abzug by Susan Davis.

Summary

GEM: (1) What do you see as the future for young women?

Ms. Abzug: Women will run the 21st century. The new millennium has to have significant change. We can't continue the errors of the past, which have been created largely by one part of the population. This is going to be the women's century, and young people are going to be its leaders.

GEM: (2) What will it take to get women to that point?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #2): The way I look at the world--it's suffering a global nervous breakdown. Part of the reason why there is all this imbalance--the division between the rich and poor, which is widening--is the imbalance in decision making. I think it's very difficult for one part of the population to make decisions, particularly for life and death--for all parts of the population. The decision makers have largely all been male, and this has been the bloodiest century we've ever had--wars, violence, rape, internal wars all over the world. It's really unacceptable.

How to we intend to [make a change]? We're building a women's movement, and we've been making it larger and larger. It's world wide. It's where it's never been before.

GEM: (3) Why is it that women and what they can contribute are so undervalued in the world today?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #3): Well, it's a long history of a long culture [The culture has seen women] as a subordinate group that are around to take care of the house and the kids and that's all. That isn't the way it is any more with women. Women are mothers as well as workers in the economies of countries all over the world. The laws and the cultures developed under entirely different conditions when women didn't work outside and were almost considered property of males. The families in some cultures--as well as the husbands--are going to have to be changed. And that's a process that's very, very hard.

GEM: (4) You've always worked to empower the powerless. Is your interest in the environment a new direction or another part of the original?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #4): The environment is key. When I read about the Earth Summit of 1992, I was shocked to see that there were only a couple of references to women because women are the managers of environment and development. And we believe that the continuance of the earth and the maintenance of its health is fundamental to life itself. So environment becomes a very key question.

You see, women are no longer interested just in what we call "women's issues." We've been mainstreamed. And because we were not allowed to really develop policy with respect to most issues, we're not wedded to the false policies of the past, the policies that have failed.

Women's Environment and Development Organization is very engaged in women's health--breast cancer, for instance. Breast cancer is every woman's nightmare and one 1 of 8 women's reality. We're having one of the first world conferences on environment in Canada with the Canadian Kingston Breast Cancer Group. It's July 13-17 in Kingston. We're looking for money and support. There will be lay people, governments, scientists--everybody.

GEM: (5) Differences in age, culture, and economic status surely must affect women's needs and the ways that they are prepared to join forces. Is there a likelihood of factions forming and hurting progress?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #5): There are always differences. There are always diverse points of view. But you'd be surprised. One thing I can tell you, having worked in a man's world, essentially for most of my adult life. [Women reach] consensus pretty quickly. Do you know why women can agree more quickly, though we come from different classes and cultures and geographies? --Because no matter where we are, no matter what country, what economic division we're in, what race, what cultural background, women are still, still the victims of discrimination of those who control power.

GEM: (6) In the U. S., is campaign finance reform important to your goals? If so, please explain the connection.

Ms. Abzug: If women don't insist an a whole new change in campaign finance reform, they're not going to get the changes of their own personal participation in greater numbers because the campaign finances are not only an obscenity but make it impossible for most people to run. So it's a very big issue affecting women candidates, women in politics, and women's programs, and women's agendas.

GEM: (7) How can international trade help the plight of women in countries that are developing economically and industrially?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #7): So far it hasn't been too helpful because, you see, the elimination of trade barriers in some instances has created jobs and so on, but in other instances it has created a free trade with no barriers and no commitments to women themselves or to labor. So it has its pluses and its minuses.

GEM: (8) Could those problems be fixed by some other approach?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #8): Well, we haven't had real enlightened thinking in government for a long time. These problems have to be fixed by having governments and people realize that there are human priorities that have to be dealt with.

I mean there's over a billion people who hunger every day in the world. If we had a 5% cut in the military budget, it would be a banquet for the world's poor--just a 5% cut. This is the post-cold-war era, and thinking has not changed sufficiently as to how to create a world that is significantly at peace. So I think that you've got to have the right people to do it. We don't, at the moment, in either party--Democrat or Republican. The Democrats have moved more and more to the center, and the Republicans have moved more and more to the right. None of that is improving the lives of most people. That's regrettable.

GEM: (9) Ms. Abzug, thank you very much. Any closing remarks?

Ms. Abzug (full text, #9): You can't continue to have a world without equal participation of men and women. That's my central thesis.

Sometimes I say that it's not that I think women are superior to men, it's just that we've had so little opportunity to be corrupted by power. And I jokingly add sometimes that we want that opportunity.